patrmich wrote on 2020-10-12, 09:05:

Is there a way to plug a floppy emulator on the RS232 or the parallel output and thus avoiding to un-plug the inbuilt floppy reader ?

I am no expert on those devices but I do not believe there is any viable ready to go solution to do this. Sorry.
Since your floppy cable has two suitable floppy connectors you should be able to connect the floppy emulator as a second floppy drive though.

Your motherboard has one of the built in barrel batteries that leak and destroy the mainboard by the way. They tend to leak especially when being loaded. I suggest until this battery is removed you avoid turning the computer on except for transferring your hdd data.

Another thought: Your HDD is contained in a removable HDD caddy. If you were to remove that you should be able to access your HDD easily to hook it up to an IDE-USB adaptor.

patrmich wrote on 2020-10-13, 19:32:

Thank you alvaro84 for your suggestion. What application would you recommend to compress files as .rar archive ? Do you recommen […]
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Thank you alvaro84 for your suggestion.
What application would you recommend to compress files as .rar archive ?
Do you recommend Winrar ?

Winrar for Windows 3.1 seems available here :
http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?t=226

But is written on the above page :
"Require to have installed Win32s extensions"

Would you know how to install Winrar on my old pc tunning under Windows 3.1 ?

Thank you in advance for any reply.

Patrick

For an old computer, I'd go with winzip (zip compression format) instead of winrar. It's lighter, therefore faster and it can also c0mpress the information spanning it over several disks. It's also easy to find for DOS and Windows 3.x.

7zip works on win98 too.

That computer has a removable HDD bay for switching out different HDDs or for security purposes.

Unlock that little lock and I'm guessing the drive holder should pop out as I don't see a pull handle. Or more likely that front panel opens downward or upward which reveals a handle to pull the drive carriage out.

Then you just remove the drive from the carriage and hook it up to your USB to IDE adapter.

On another note, removable drive bays have always been really sketchy as far as making a good connection. If the connection isn't just right, you have a good chance of the drive not being detected and/or dropping off while in operation, causing file corruption.

Hello,

I received all the necessary connectors to connect the old Kenitec 486X2-50 hard disk (500 Mo) on my current computer (running under Windows 10)

But the hard disk is not showing up.

Using the same accessories, I connected a Maxtor IDE hard disk, dated from 2004, and it was instantaneously showing up on my current computer.

Would you know how to make the old hard disk showing up ?

Thank you in advance for any reply.

Patrick

patrmich wrote on 2020-10-19, 15:56:

Hello, […]
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Hello,

I received all the necessary connectors to connect the old Kenitec 486X2-50 hard disk (500 Mo) on my current computer (running under Windows 10)

But the hard disk is not showing up.

Using the same accessories, I connected a Maxtor IDE hard disk, dated from 2004, and it was instantaneously showing up on my current computer.

Would you know how to make the old hard disk showing up ?

Thank you in advance for any reply.

Patrick

AFAIK, most (possibly all) USB to IDE adapters only support LBA addressing. If your drive is old enough to only support CHS,and not LBA, then your drive will not work work with USB to IDE adapter .

See also https://goughlui.com/2012/11/11/old-chs-drive … de-controllers/

If you insist to leave the drives in place, there is always the primitive null modem and faster laplink cable. Just look them up on Wikipedia.

Considering you can work with floppy disks, I guess you have a computer that will run a Windows 98 boot disk.

Both computers need to run DOS for my description and need to have interlnk and intersvr installed. they come with PCDOS 5.02 and MS-DOS 6.00/6.22 and work just fine with win 9x DOS mode. The target computer may be booted from floppy disk, but need to have access to the hard disk and a fat16 partition.

Connect one of these cables to both computers use interlnk.exe on the old 486 and intersvr.exe on the target computer.

These create a bridge between the computers as if it's an extra hard drive.

I guess you could use these cables from Windows, but not sure how to...

An XTIDE BIOS on an ISA network card could be an alternative to a driver overlay .
It is supposed to support LBA48 and my test results pointed in that direction but were not 100% conclusive . One thing I can confirm is that a drive bigger than 127GB, when partitionned and formatted on a system using an XTIDE (latest version available at the time of tests) will not be readable on another system (there may be ways around this). Conversely, a drive bigger than 127GB formatted on a modern system (using MBR and FAT32) will not be readable on the XTIDE equipped system .

If you want more info about my experiments, see Re: Adding XT-IDE option ROM to Asus P3B-F BIOS . .
Do note that for these tests, the XTIDE BIOS was loaded as option ROM on the main BIOS chip of an Asus P3B-F, rather than on a ISA network card, as an experiment. The results using LBA48 drives should still be relevant, IMHO .

I prefer the dos programs like rar, arj, pkzip... etc, but I am more comfortable with command line programs. I just feel like I have more control over what the program does with those. They can also divided bigger files to multiple floppies. I used them pretty much exclusively to store data and programs on floppies in 80s and 90s before burning CDs became the main thing.

First: unplug the IDE cable from that docking drive and carefully inspect pins that not spread apart and also make sure the cable connector is lined up correctly, do this first before powering on again.

Cheers,

Just saying, if you had started using floppies (with or without some compression utility like zip or rar) back when you first asked how to transfer the files you would have finished by now 😀
Seeing all the problems that you ran into until now, maybe it's an option to reconsider?